I would argue that there is no such thing. If you really look at the big picture, there ought to be no active selling in consultative selling. If you look back at all the times you have really been successful in closing a deal, you’d realize that more often than not, you have thought less about closing the deal and more about helping your prospect buy. You will realize that each of those times, you really weren’t wearing the old sales hat.

Love the read… although, it would be tempting to conclude that you shouldn’t *have* a sales process… which would be a mistake. Or that if you have one, it should *only* reflect a customer’s buying process – which would also be a mistake.

You have to understand how the customer buys – and why. But that doesn’t mean that you should neglect to define and measure your own sales process – just make sure that it is at a level of granularity that doesn’t force customers through unnecessary bureaucracy, or expect them to conform to your process.

The mistake many people and firms make is in caring too much about their own internal process, and not enough about how the customer buys. Having worked on software to support sales processes for many different companies and industries, however, I can assure you that you don’t want to leave your sales process unmanaged, unmonitored, nor unmeasured. Just keep your eye on taking care of your customer!